Ruling of the District Court of Amsterdam dated November 18, 2020

Translation: Requester is of Afghan origin. Upon her arrival in the country, her name was incorrectly translated from Arabic to Dutch, leading to the official registration of her name as Ferana*.

In the Persian language, the name should actually be written as Ferhana. Requester aims to use a name change request to ensure that her name is correctly recorded in the Dutch registers.

Requester argues that she experiences strong inconvenience due to the incorrect name registration, referring to a ruling by the Court of Appeals Arnhem-Leeuwarden on April 14, 2015, ECLI:NL:GHARL:2015:2682, r.o. 4.4., where a name change request was also considered. The court granted the request and ruled: “The court [is], unlike the lower court, of the opinion that the requester has sufficiently demonstrated that he has a compelling interest in the requested change of his first names. The requester has sufficiently argued that he is heavily emotionally burdened when confronted with his official first names.”

Requester does not have a birth certificate and cannot obtain one. She has been residing in the Netherlands from a young age and has no connection to Afghanistan. Due to her refugee status, she cannot approach the authorities in Afghanistan to obtain a birth certificate. While she can provide IND hearings, these are mainly documents from her parents’ asylum procedure, as she was still a child when she arrived in the Netherlands.

The court grants the name change request. A first name can only be changed in the Netherlands if there is a (Dutch) birth certificate. If there is none, it must be demonstrated that the person cannot provide a birth certificate. In the procedure, the court considered this sufficiently plausible based on the evidence presented by the requester. In accordance with the proposal of the registrar of births, deaths, and marriages in The Hague, the court officially established her birth data.

*Actual first name is fictional.